A HUMANIST PLEA FOR FREE-RANGING ANTIQUITIES

By Alan Behr

NEW YORK, 14 AUGUST 2008 - There are few
subjects in law more contentious than property rights, and when
property stirs the emotions, there can be no end to the
bickering. Divorce proceedings are notorious for that, as
anyone knows who has ever battled a soon-to-be-ex-spouse to
exhaustion over a sofa, clock or spaniel of no value or charm.

Nations can play that game too, and because they do it with
antiquities, they are finding that the Zeitgeist is in their
favor, reports James Cuno in his new book, Who Owns
Antiquity? (Princeton University Press, 256 pages). Cuno
is the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago -
one of the encyclopedic art museums (to use Cuno's phrase) that
are the quiet protagonists of his book. They are the museums
that, like bees ranging over a broad field, pollinate the world
with the art, history and culture of its constituent regions.
The Elgin Marbles
were carved in Athens and the Rosetta Stone was found in Egypt,
but they are now displayed at the British Museum, in London.
The Pergamon Altar was built by the Greeks, removed from what
is now Turkey and is on view in Berlin. I used to be able to
take a ten-minute walk to The Metropolitan Museum to see the
Euphronios
krater , one of the finest surviving bowls of classical
Greece, but I can't do that anymore because it was packed off -
not to Greece, but to Italy.

Fair enough: Italian courts concluded that the krater had been
looted fairly recently from an Etruscan tomb, and title indeed
does not pass to stolen goods. The problem, argues Cuno, is a
new round of what he calls "nationalist retentionist cultural
property laws" that effectively prohibit the export from modern
countries of anything of artistic or cultural importance found
within their borders - regardless of whether those nations or
their inhabitants have any affinity to the makers of the
antiquities other than to have inhabited the same space at a
different time. So we have Egypt - a country both Arab and
Muslim - claiming national ownership of all antiquities from
the age of the
Pharaohs, and China claiming rights to works by ancient
populations that weren't even Chinese, such as the Uighurs of
the province of Xinjiang, who were a mix of Mongol and
Indo-European peoples.

Cuno devotes much of his book to those laws and their
consequences, and as a lawyer, I recognize his book for what it
is: a legal brief. It is the particular vanity of lawyers to
conclude that, whatever brief they read, they surely could have
written it better, but I am willing to stretch outside my
professional training to say that Cuno has done a fine job. As
in many briefs, Cuno makes his key points more than once and
perhaps too often, but they are points worth making: that all
consequential culture becomes international, and all culture
should therefore be shared with the world, not hoarded for
reasons of skewed nationalism (or out of desire for tourism
revenues) in the places where artifacts were made or just
happened to have been dug up. Says the author,

Nationalist retentionist cultural property laws are not
archaeological sites protection laws. They are retentionist
cultural property laws, intent on keeping what they identify as
national cultural property within the country for the nation,
for the sake of affirming and strengthening claims on a
national identity, on just what the nation is: a unique
cultural identity identifiable by its forms and practices,
coincident in reach with the extent of its current political
borders, and that confirms a particular kind of identity on the
people of the nation.

The most telling part of Cuno's thesis is his warning that the
impulse to hoard antiquity is related to the perils of
excessive nationalism. He documents the steadily tightening
claims by Turkey on all antiquities, regardless of origin,
found inside its borders, starting with an 1884 Ottoman decree,
through the latest law, enacted almost a century later. In
parallel, he tracks changes in demographics: in the first
Turkish census, in 1924, just over a quarter of the population
of what was soon to be renamed Istanbul was Greek; today, it is
only a few thousand. Meanwhile, the country's Western-looking
and internationalizing reforms are under threat by a new wave
of demands for religious and national purity.

Concludes Cuno,

And all of the rough and tumble untidiness of the streets of
Istanbul, once filled with Greeks, Jews, and Christians from
throughout Europe is tidied up and left to Turks,
overwhelmingly so, and mostly Sunni Muslim Turks at that.
That's the nature of nation building. It subjects the past and
the present to the rigors of identity control. And archaeology
and national museums are used as a means of enforcing that
control.

Although Cuno is too gracious to drill his argument through the
next level-that the final stop on the line to nationalism is
fascism and that the result of ethnic and religious purity is
all too often persecution and worse-the implications cannot be
ignored. Quoting Edward Said ("â€¦there is no such thing as an
isolated humanist."), Kwame Anthony Appiah ("Cultural purity is
an oxymoron.") and Diderot (on being a citizen of "that great
city, the world"), Cuno calls for an expansive view by which
nations understand that all countries are built and maintained
with foreign influences, and that the world's store of
antiquities needs to be shared so that that process can
continue. It is that enduring humanist message, more than the
law and the politics recounted by Cuno, that makes his book
compelling.